An organization called Arkive, which launched out of stealth mode on Wednesday, aims to use the power of the internet to build what it calls the first decentralized, physical museum.
Arkive admits people from around the world as members, with about 200 signed up so far and another 800 on a waiting list, and enables them to vote on what historical and artistic artifacts the museum will acquire. The museum intends to keep the items long-term but not to build a single site to host them. Instead, it will display them to the public through loans to other institutions. The museum currently admits about 50 new members per month, though it plans to ramp up this process in order to have about 10,000 signed up by the end of 2023.
For the museum’s first exhibit, the existing members acquired a historic bound patent filing for the ENIAC, a pioneering digital computer of the mid-20th century. “You would have none of this if you didn’t have the first computer,” says Arkive cofounder Tom McLeod, who previously headed the now-defunct storage and equipment rental platform Omni.
The second acquisition, a 1980s print titled “Seduction” by the artist Lynn Hershman Leeson, depicts a woman whose head has been replaced by a television set—itself a commentary on the relationship between art, gender, and technology.

“We don’t want it on anyone’s private walls,” McLeod says. “We want everything out.”
Future acquisitions, which will occur roughly every month, will focus on a periodically changing theme—the current theme, through the next six acquisitions, is “When Technology Was a Game Changer”—and will all be selected by Arkive members.

Members communicate via Discord and cast their votes using their Ethereum wallets—McLeod says the technology could potentially be opened up to other organizations in the future—and there’s talk of launching NFTs tied to membership. But Arkive seems to have plans to avoid some of the issues that have plagued previous attempts to democratize major art and artifact purchases (see: the failed effort to buy an early copy of the U.S. Constitution, and the online consortium that paid an unexpectedly high amount for director Alejandro Jodorowsky’s pitch to adapt Dune, perhaps under the mistaken belief the document came with the actual movie rights).

Arkive’s policy of lending out works to existing museums to display should also eliminate a lot of storage-related costs. Not having a single location will also give Arkive more flexibility than a traditional museum in what to acquire, McLeod suggests. And while Arkive may like any museum occasionally sell off works for various purposes, McLeod says the organization plans to hold on to ownership of the majority of its acquisitions, he says.
“We’d like to call this a permanent collection,” he says.
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